


Pride

by iopeneditbeforechristmas



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-06 00:52:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4201614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iopeneditbeforechristmas/pseuds/iopeneditbeforechristmas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, pride is all he has. That, and the human woman curled up on the couch beside him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pride

Pride. It’s a strange thing, really. Nishiki has a reputation for being arrogant, for thinking he’s cock of the walk, king of the world. In a way, he is; he likes his feeding grounds to remain his, takes on ghouls more powerful than he could ever hope to be. They know he couldn’t care less about any of their opinions in the least, but then again, that’s true for the rest of them too; none of them have time to be caring about how they’re thought of. Their main concern is where they’re going to find their next meal.

There’s only one person whose opinion Nishiki really cares about.

She comes home from university tired, face pale and drawn. She’s wearing jeans and a top, covered by a jacket that she sheds as soon as she gets in. Her tank top reveals the scar that mars her shoulder, painfully obvious against her pale flesh.

Nishiki looks up and Kimi smiles at him. He’s completely recovered from the fight with Tsukiyama at the church, but Kimi has never seen him in a state so bad he’s had to be carried home, presumably by Kaneki – he’s never _been_ in a state where he’s had to be carried home, and especially not by that eyepatch bastard. Well, there’s never been anyone who could carry him home either way, not even his sister once he started to grow taller. So Kimi’s never seen him like that, and it’s shaken her. Nishiki accepts her ministrations, taking coffee, hot and cold, whenever she brings it to him, refusing only human medicine he knows he can’t eat. Heck, if she brought him human food he’d probably eat it, but there’s little to nothing known about ghoul physiology beyond the basics, at least that’s available to the ones who’d need it, and he can’t risk having his insides scrambled by paracetamol.

Sometimes, Nishiki wonders why he’s a pharmacy student.

It’s not something he’s ever really thought about before; he’s smart and he knows it and he likes the labs and the sanitary smell. It’s nice, not having all the scents of everyone in the vicinity bombarding you at every moment. And his nose isn’t even that great, not like people say the Fueguchi girl’s is. She’s staying at Anteiku now, he’s heard. Both parents dead. Poor brat. Well, it’s about time she learned the world’s a cruel place to live in; she’s not much younger than he was when he found that out properly. Not the aching cruelty of perpetual hunger and a diet of rotten flesh crawling with maggots, but the sharp, biting pain of losing someone that you love.

“Nishiki? Are you all right?”

He’s jerked out of his morbid thoughts by Kimi’s voice. She hasn’t paused in her fretting since she got back, pointedly ignoring his complaints that he doesn’t need to lie on the couch anymore in the way that makes him melt like only she can. She asks if he’s hungry, and he says he’s fine. Maybe she can tell that he’s lying a little bit, but even if she does she doesn’t offer him her own meat. She’s a perceptive girl. Surely she knows what that’d do to him.

The news is the usual, some international stuff, something about a celebration in one of the wards, until it switches to the sombre tone it always takes whenever the topic of discussion turns to ghouls. There’s an investigator on screen, young and enthusiastic, his brown hair sporting a ridiculous antenna.

“So, Investigator Takizawa, can you tell us more about the recent activity in the 20th ward?”

“Sure!” Takizawa grins, filled with the kind of zeal that only the truly stupid can have. “Ghoul activity there seems to be increasing; we believe it may have been kickstarted by the arrival of an infamous ghoul known as the Binge-Eater, but since that ghoul’s activity has died down recently but the rate of incidents has continued to rise, there are clearly other factors at play here.”

“And what is the CCG doing to assure the safety of the people it protects?”

“We’ve stepped up surveillance there, of course, and some of our best teams are on the case. We’ve recently got rid of one ghoul we’ve been hunting for a while; one we think was as peaceful as they can be, but with ties to other ghouls that were far too dangerous for us to turn our attention to until we were sure she was wiped out.”

 _Wiped out._ Nishiki involuntarily clenches his fists, seething with anger he didn’t know he could feel anymore. Wiped out…they know, don’t they? They know exactly what they’re doing when they kill people like him… _things_ like him. They _know,_ how they rip lives apart with the flash of a quinque, and they don’t care. They watch as people like Nishiki watch their loved ones, their protectors, bleed out in the rain. And they don’t fucking care. Some of them probably even get a kick out of it, seeing the monsters cry. It has to be why some of them are in the business. Course, there’s also the stupid idiots like the one on the TV who want the glory of exterminating the ghouls, and there’s those who are in it to make the world a better place, and then there are the ones in it for revenge, a motivation Nishiki can understand all too well.

They’re all bastards, either way.

He doesn’t realise how tense he is until Kimi places a soothing hand on his shoulder. _Shoulder._ That was where he bit her, where she still has that scar and she will until she dies, and it’s all Nishiki’s fucking fault.

“Nishiki?” Kimi asks, in that gentle way that would make him want to punch whoever else it was using it but instead just makes him want to kiss her. “Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” he mutters, though he’s not really sorry at all, “I just…forgot how much I hated the doves.”

“The doves,” Kimi says, “Is that what you…is that what ghouls call investigators?”

It’s still awkward for her. Nishiki can sense it. He’s a monster and she’s a human, a perfect one. He’s sitting there and could theoretically eat her at any moment, could whip out his kagune and stab her and she’d have no hope unless she could find some way to exacerbate his injuries and leg it. He’s part of a whole other world, one dark and dangerous and terrifying, and Nishiki can tell that Kimi still doesn’t know what to make of it. She’s trying, though. He loves her for it.

“Yeah,” he sighs, “That’s what we call them. I don’t know how the name came up, but it’s here now.”

She nods, slowly, like she’s making a real effort to understand his world. “And…you hate them.”

“Yeah.”

That’s all Nishiki says, and Kimi doesn’t press him, but he still feels like she deserves something else, something more. He knows everything he could want about her, about her parents, her loss. She’s told him exactly what he is to her and Nishiki…well, he’s told her jack shit.

“I had a sister,” he blurts out, “They killed her.”

“Oh,” says Kimi. “Why?

“Why do you think?” Nishiki mutters bitterly, the memories he’s tried to forget making him sour, “’Cause she was a ghoul.”

He takes a deep breath, trying to steel himself for what he’ll tell her next. Years, and he still hasn’t really got over it. Repressing everything hasn’t helped, of course.

“I used to hate hunting,” he tells Kimi, and feeling her nod beside him gives him strength, “So she’d do it for me. We lived like rats, obviously. We moved around quite a bit, but wherever it was, we ended up in a shithole. And eventually, she decided that she didn’t want that anymore, so she went and got a job. I grew up and she went through several, but she never gave up. Always kept her cover, always protected me. Did everything I was too fucking cowardly to do myself. One job, her boss started asking questions. She answered them as best she could but he copped on. Sent the doves after us. I came home to find her bleeding out in the rain, dying like a fucking dog.”

He stops, clenches his fist. Whether or not he can go on with the story turns out not to mean a thing. It’s no longer a matter of what he’s too much of a pissbaby to do; it’s about Kimi now, and what she deserves.

“She gave me my name, you know. Nishio. It was on some shitty registry form she still had, but she gave it to me. My ticket out, or at least to this life. Can’t say it’s much of an upgrade.”

Kimi laughs, this time. She’s been silent for so long that Nishiki doesn’t know what she’s thinking and at first her laugh hurts him, but he knows her laugh and this isn’t the one she uses when she thinks something’s funny. It’s just the sound she makes when he’s being an idiot.

“Can’t be that bad, seeing as you’ve got me.”

Despite himself, Nishiki laughs. The stupid dove’s gone from the TV, and it’s been long enough that he’s almost forgotten Tsukiyama and the feeling of having his body ripped apart by a shitty purple kagune. It wasn’t as painful as the thought of losing Kimi though, and the humiliation of being beat up like that in front of the eyepatch bastard and shitty Touka will always be ranked pretty up high up in his list of painful experiences.

So yes. Maybe Nishiki is proud, even if he does know he’s a monster. It’s been his defence for more years than he cares to admit, a wall behind which he could hide like the fucking coward he is. In the end, pride is all he’s got. That, and the human woman curled up on the couch beside him.

**Author's Note:**

> This arose out of nowhere, but as I was writing I realised that we don't know how much Kimi knows about Nishiki's past, and that's how it took the direction it did. While I was writing it I tried to capture Nishiki's arrogance, but also the fact that I have no doubt he's pretty insecure about Kimi, and actually himself in general. I think it came across too obvious though, so let me know what you think please!


End file.
